“America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction”, 2014-09-01 (; backlinks; similar):
[Why is American politics so increasingly dysfunctional: less and less legislation passes on increasingly partisan grounds leading to gridlock, ever more matters are decided by judicial fiat, the imperial presidency expands to fill the vacuum, and every presidential election is more cutthroat and extreme than the one before it as controlling the presidency & Supreme Court nominations is seen as matters nothing short of existential survival.
Fukuyama diagnoses a major falloff in American state capacity, caused by its original design of checks-and-balances: a system which was perhaps reasonable centuries ago has been pushed to its limits as the USA has grown orders of magnitude larger in population, geographic size, and societal complexity, while the old system of amendments etc has fallen apart. Major legal changes, like gay marriage, which should have happened by constitutional amendment, instead are imposed (in striking contrast to more functional parliamentary democracies like France/Germany/UK—it is no accident that so few new democracies choose to emulate the USA’s Constitution). In response, empowered by ‘elastic clauses’, a hidden constitution of bureaucracies, administrative law, and courts has replaced it.
This replacement, however, has never been made explicit: obsolete old institutions persist, new missions and constraints are larded onto institutions, more and more interest groups and classes of favored insiders protect the status quo creating a “vetocracy”, and the lack of legitimacy and explicit authority means that decisions are never final, and anyone can use the fickle slow courts at any time to launch a new attack on what ought to have been decided already (or at least obstruct it). The responses to these pathologies, however, are themselves pathological, adding ever more restrictive and inconsistent rules. This further undermines public trust and participation.
Because of this, agreements are never final, political bargains cannot be enforced under winner-take-all conditions, and capture of the judiciary and executive branch become the supreme priority. Precisely because of the vetocracy and failed formal institutions, reform within the system become nearly impossible. The vested interests benefit too much and are not motivated to reform it.]
The depressing bottom line is that given how self-reinforcing the country’s political malaise is, and how unlikely the prospects for constructive incremental reform are, the decay of American politics will probably continue until some external shock comes along to catalyze a true reform coalition an galvanize it into action.